I went back last year. The lane looks the same. The town now has a new coat of gray instead of the greens – a colour I would not have chosen, but I guess capitalism forced it. The sky now looks like a flat shade of yellow and vermillion hue, but a pinch of moving green leaves and black shadows of the birds flying back to their tiny nests where their newborns wait for the food; suited the town better!
I stood outside for longer than made sense. I was looking for something. I did not find it. There is a specific kind of disorientation that comes from returning to a place that holds an old version of you.
It is not nostalgia exactly. Nostalgia is soft and golden and willing to lie to you. This is something sharper. You are standing in a place that remembers you and you are looking around trying to find proof that you were here, that she was here, that the person you were in these streets actually existed and was not something you invented in retrospect.
The proof is everywhere. It is also not enough.
She was different here. The girl who grew up in this town.
She had not yet learned to be careful with herself. She said things without first calculating the cost. She wanted things loudly and without apology and she was wrong about most of them and she did not know that yet and that not-knowing was its own kind of freedom.
She walked these streets with the specific confidence of someone who has not yet been disappointed by herself. That is not something you can go back to. That is not even something you would want to go back to, most days.
Most days.
What is strange about the town is that it does not know you left.
The chai stall on the corner does not register the gap. The temple does not note your absence in any record. The lane where you used to walk home does not hold the shape of you anymore, if it ever did. You were always just passing through. The town was always just being itself, indifferent and continuous, while you were inside it constructing a self.
The self left. The town stayed. This seems unfair even though it is entirely reasonable.
I walked past the school.
Same gate. Different shades of emotions passed by when I saw the students playing on the campus. The uniform has been changed, there’s a new building, the library has been shifted to another wing.
Places do not hold people. People hold places. And then they leave, and the place does not notice, and the people carry the place in some fold of themselves where grief and love sit too close together to separate.
The thing that stayed the same was the smell of rain on hot concrete.
I did not expect that. I was not prepared for how fast it took me back, not to a specific memory but to a feeling. The feeling of being young and certain and entirely unfinished and not knowing you were any of those things.
That smell found the person who used to live here faster than anything I could have looked for. She was there for exactly a moment. In the smell of rain. On a lane that I did not know I had left.
I do not know if I would want to go back. Not to the town I could go back to, but to her.
I think I would want to tell her things. I think I would want to say: the things you are most afraid of- do not happen the way you think they will. The things you are not afraid of are the ones that cost you. You are going to be okay and that is not the same as saying you are not going to be broken first.
I think I would want to hold her face and look at her and say: you do not have to earn it yet. Just be here. Just be young and have the courage to be wrong instead of not doing and regretting it the rest of your life time.
I stood outside for a long time and then I left, because that is what I do now. I leave. I have gotten very good at it.
The town did not notice. It never does. The town I grew up in doesn’t exist anymore. Neither does the person who lived there.
